36 Scratchcards

I never bought a scratchcard until I became a mother. Or subscribed to the Lottery website for that matter. It probably had something to do with the fact that I had cleverly timed my pregnancy to coincide with the worst global recession in living memory. Have you seen how much a pack of Aptamil costs these days? £8! That’s way more than I usually spend on a bottle of wine. As well as worrying about how to afford the basics - heating, shelter, childcare, sufficient Jaffa Cakes - there’s always the university fund to think about. (Though faced with the end of money, certain doom for our planet and total breakdown of civilisation as we know it, I’m not sure having gone to university will have quite the same cachet in the future. Our cherished offspring will be too busy building mudhuts and munching earthworms to fret about what subject to write their dissertation on.)

But it was the Rich For Life scratchcard telly advert that really hooked me in. A guaranteed £40,000 a year for the rest of my life! I wouldn’t have to worry about paying my overdue library fines ever again! Unless we end up in a situation of Zimbabwe style hyper-inflation, of course. In which case £40,000 will probably just about buy you 20 Marlboro Lights and a bag of Hulahoops. The ‘Moderately well-off for the next couple of years’ scratchcard doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, though does it?’ I’m still going to be buying them though. I’ll take what I can get.

35 Eating cereal straight out of the box

OK, it’s possible that this is just me along with that category of adult males who never learned how to use the oven.

But when you’ve just had a baby, you often find yourself eating foods alone that once used to be a mere component of a nutritionally balanced meal. A solitary chunk of cheese, say. Or half a tomato. Possibly a lone finger of KitKat (admittedly this was never actually part of a balanced meal, but you probably would have managed two fingers in one sitting).

Getting it together to find a bowl, put the cornflakes in it, pour milk on top and find a spoon? You must be joking. Plus you’d have to go out and actually buy a pint of milk. You’re still in your dressing gown, for heaven’s sake, and it’s 4pm.

Lunch, once taken somewhere between 1pm and 2pm, is a hurried, disjointed affair at half-past three, enjoyed during that brief window of time when your baby isn’t hungry, tired, needing to be changed, suffering from ennui/existential angst/separation anxiety ('Mummy has left the room! I'm pretty sure she's gone forever this time!') or just being difficult for no good reason. That’s on a good day. On a bad one, it’s half-past five.

Other strange things you may find yourself eating in lieu of a proper meal include: chocolate digestives (for breakfast), cold toast (without butter; see also cold tea and, worst of all, cold soup). Possibly some unhappy shredded lettuce on its own if you’re having a fat day. Tuna, straight out of the can, wolfed down unceremoniously like dogfood. A Nutrigrain, whose vaguely food-a-ceutical packaging and blurb makes you feel virtuous even if it is basically a Jammy Dodger in disguise.

It goes without saying, you will also eat the remains of whatever disgusting goo your baby is eating today. (Remember girls it only takes an extra 100 calories a day to add up to an extra 10lb of weight a year.) Though you positively draw the line at pureed parsnip. You may no longer be able to participate in all the major food groups, but you still have your standards.

34 Frozen Peas

What would mothers do without frozen peas? You've just got home, your little one is starving and you're down to a slice of manky ham, half a Babybel, the usual pasta screws (you never allow yourself to run out of those) and you know you ought to give your little darling some vegetables but you didn't get a chance to visit the organic greengrocers* in between racing between nursery, bus, train and work [check emails, look busy, munch lunch, check emails, look busy], then train, then bus, then nursery and then home. Not if you live in the back end of arsewhere anyway. Because your corner shop doesn't stock vegetables seeing as the locals survive well enough on kebabs. But enough digression already.

So we grind out the bottom drawer of the freezer (when will you ever have time to defrost that damn receptacle again?) and tumble some peas into a garish coloured Ikea kids bowl (every mummy has a set of these, it's mandatory), shove it in the micro. Bob's your gay uncle, you have something resembling a meal without so much as breaking into a sweat. Of course, that's if your 2-year-old hasn't yet developed that peculiar aversion to anything 'green' which afflicts 75% of all toddlers at some stage or another. In which case just keep a bottle of food colouring handy. Purple works a treat. Or go the sweetcorn route - another sure-thing standby. There isn't a kid under 5 who doesn't love the yellow stuff - fact.

*mythical outlets of overpriced superhealthy food which were invented by health columnists and baby guide authors to make mummies feel guilty for feeding their precious ones frozen peas

33 Day nurseries that stay open late

What is it with nurseries and their crazy opening hours? Perhaps it’s just the ones near where I live, but none of them seem to stay open past 6pm. That's if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, it's 5pm.

I’ve never ever had a job where I didn’t have the best part of an hour commute door-to-door. And I’ve never had a job where I finished working before 5.30pm, usually 6pm. Even when home time arrives, there is the obligatory few minutes where you round off the day’s tasks, shuffle papers and basically try not to look like a work-shy clockwatcher who’s waiting for the big hand to hit the six.

Shooting out of the door on the dot of half five is frowned upon in many offices - so really we’re talking about a working day that ends at 5.45pm or 6.15pm. OK, that gives me two minutes to get out of the building, 12 minutes to fly home and one minute’s grace before we go into bank-busting overtime. Now where did I leave my time machine?

Who exactly are those mothers who finish work at 5pm then make the leisurely ten minute stroll to their nursery? What do they all do? Where do they work (and can they give me a job)? Do they just spend their days shopping? This a mystery I have yet to solve.

Life is hard enough for working mothers. We go to the office, half-dead from lack of sleep, with porridge on our sleeves and snot in our hair. We have to apply mascara on the Tube, while other people stare at us. Commuting should be a break for us, a chance for us to catch up on reading trashy novels and London Lite. Not 45 minutes of blind panic and shallow breathing as we will the Central Line not to grind to a shuddering halt yet again. We need nurseries with long opening hours, so we don’t arrive at the gates panting and sweating, and then find we’re being charged another tenner for those extra five minutes after all.

Maybe longer hours would be tough on nursery staff. But aren’t they supposed to be providing a service for the rest of us? Couldn’t they work shifts? Or are we the only people out there with such difficult lives? Answers to these questions and more on a postcard…

32 Watching Loose Women with the subtitles on

For me, it all started a couple of years back with Deadwood. For those unfamiliar with this superior US drama, it’s set in a lawless 1870s goldrush camp and stars Ian ‘Lovejoy’ McShane as a Machiavellian saloon owner. Pride and Prejudice this ain’t, with profuse swearing and brothels on every corner. The language that the characters speak is almost Shakespearian in its eloquence and wit, some of it apparently even written in iambic pentameters – and with subtitles on I found I was able to appreciate it to a whole new level. Then came The Wire. I had no idea what the hell was going on at the start, only that it looked a bit scary. But the jargon of Baltimore's inner city drug runners suddenly became poetic – rather than plain incomprehensible – with the subtitles switched permanently to ‘on’. Before long I was watching loads of things with subtitles on – films, Frasier, Mad Men.

And then I had my baby and subtitles really came into their own. With the constant crying, gurgling, babbling and plinky tunes that now forms the background noise of life, subtitles are no longer handy for catching those missed witticisms and asides, they are darn well crucial for following the plot. OK, I know Loose Women doesn’t have a plot but you know what I mean (actually live subtitles tend to be annoyingly hit and miss, it has to be said - see above image).

Now if I don’t have subtitles on for anything other than Teletubbies, I feel I am trying to play snooker underwater or the piano blind-folded. I never realised quite how much dialogue I missed before as 'method' actors fashionably mumble, grunt and slur their way through scripts. For instance, the brilliant new 30 Rock on Five USA doesn't have subtitles, unlike the DVD box set - and I find it irritating beyond belief when I do miss the odd line here and there.

Anyway. Subtitles. Try them. I promise you’ll be hooked before you know it too.

31 Big Slobbery Kisses

Nobody in their right mind would enjoy being slobbered and schlicked by an over-salivating old aunt. But switch the aunt for your bubba and - my oh my. Bring it on. We can't help it, we go weak at the knees, we go all gooey in our brains and we go all slush-puppy in our hearts. There's nothing like your first smacker from your little one. And once they learn how to make you melt they have you round their little pudgy fingers. So what if it's 6am and you know any minute the first tantrum of the day will screech its way around the corner. She's sucking your ear, slobbering your nose and squelching your eyes with an "I love you Mummy" to break your heart. And all you can think is: So. This. Is. Why. We. Do. It.

30 Mistresses

'Mistresses' is great. It features sassy, older female characters misbehaving horribly, and is utterly brainless. In short, it's perfect veg-out-after-four-hours-sleep evening telly.

However, I don't know if this struck anyone else as so brilliantly laughable as to be insane, but the new series also features a character, Siobhan, who has a young baby - possibly six-months-old judging by the size of her (and we new mums love to endlessly analyze TV babies).

At night, when baby has gone to sleep and her unsuspecting husband is similarly out for the count, Siobhan sneaks out of the house, hangs out in upmarket hotel bars and picks up strange men, before having hot, nameless sex with them. She then pops back home again, and slips back into bed, where hubby is still snoring. All without once checking the baby monitor.

Obviously I understand this is a mainstream BBC1 drama and not to be confused with real life in any shape or form. But even so. At six months after the birth, most of us are just about getting used to sex with our own partners let alone sharing our episiotomy scars and taking our clothes off in front of complete strangers. The idea that after months of deliriously wide-eyed nights, when our darling baby is finally sleeping through, we would then actually want to dress up to the nines (in the dark mind, with full make-up), and drive off into the night for a bit on the side is too fantastical for words. Most days we don't even put lip-balm on. And what happens when, inevitably, baby wakes up at 2am? Sorry angel, Mummy was too darn busy getting jiggy with that creepy older guy in room 402 to worry about changing your nappy or feeding you. But don't worry, she'll probably be back in the morning, just looking a teeny bit worse for wear. And smelling of unfamiliar aftershave.

Of course, this is partly why we like 'Mistresses'. We may not actually want to be Siobhan. We would frankly much rather have another ten minutes shut-eye than a meaningless brief encounter in some godforsaken Travelodge. But we like the fact that she is supposed to be a new mum who is still sexy and still being naughty. It just makes us feel a bit exhausted watching her.